Is it socially acceptable to hang out with a freshman?

I’m a sophomore in HS and since the beginning of the year I’ve made a few freshman friends. I’m currently being ruled out as a creep.

I’m on the Cross Country team for our school and there are a few 9th graders in it too. I’ve made friends with a couple of them and one best friend who we’ll call F. Me and F get along well, we run similar times and our training is similar. So we hung out a few times individually to go on a run.

We sometimes post our run progress on our IG stories, and a couple days ago we did and someone in my grade replied with a long paragraph basically saying how I was weird for being a predator to a younger student, “F”. I didn’t reply, but obviously that isn’t true as we’re the same age (15) and we’re both guys, but then they posted an ss of my story along with their message onto their story basically calling me out, and I’ve been losing followers. I didn’t say anything creepy about F, we aren’t in any study groups, and we don’t even eat lunch together.

I told F about the story but he said that it’s fine.

Is it really fine? Should I leave him behind or should I just not care?